Best European Fiction 2015

It was a great pleasure to be set free on a huge pile of submissions from across Europe, and to select and compile what I thought were the best, most original and most interesting 33 stories.

Starting out with no clear themes in mind, I found that contemporary European writers share many of the same concerns, so it became easy for me to group together works examining an idea from different angles, and to run various threads through the selection, from Enrique Vila-Matas’s brilliant preface, through Joanna Walsh’s opening story, to Edy Poppy’s winsome Dungeness, which closes the anthology.

BEF 2015 has been well received: Daniel Hahn wrote an incisive review for The Guardian, picking up on some of the darkness I seem, through my choices, to have brought to this year’s collection!